


There Once Was A Girl

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Other, Poetic, Semi-autobiographical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 06:19:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6644791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wee, semi-autobiographical exploration of our relationships to books and fictional characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Once Was A Girl

There once was a girl, great mass of muddy hair sliding easily into shadow and breath eaten up by the library stacks in the dusty golden eternity of the afternoon. In her eager palm opened worlds poorly contained by paper, the words escaping into the vast emptiness between her ears. She ate the words hungrily, and in them she gained a sword and a world to save, alien races she knew better than her own. She wanted them all, knowing they were idealized, knowing they were but some small fraction of the life that surrounded her. She wanted them all and did not care, because the words ate her back.

There once was a girl, knob-kneed and clumsy, squirreling up the trees with apples in her pocket and a book between her teeth. She climbed until she could not be seen, until the leaves were the walls around her and their whispers the only sound. She settled into the pinching fork of a branch, letting it cup her as she wrapped her legs around the trunk and opened the book. In the distance, a voice calling her name faded away. It was just that easy.

There once was a girl who watched, wedged herself into corners, watchful over the brim of a paperback as the other children ran and played. She mimicked their games in her head, notes and paper falling into neat files behind her eyes. They rioted there, rioted on the field, in playgrounds and the classroom, and she tracked them less closely than the characters in her books, because unlike the beautiful pain of fiction, their riots never came to a conclusion, only exhaustion, and she was exhausted simply watching them go.

There once was a girl whose friends had been created by disgruntled forty-something writers, whose relationship with the world was as fraught with uncertainty as her own. She spoke to other children about it, staring one in the eyes because she’d read a book about telepathy and hoping to skip the fumbling hazards of trying to speak. After years of silence, a friend called her and said, “Don’t you remember? You never talked about anything else.”

There once was a girl who read about love, the great storm-racked swells of romance in which nearly fucking occupied two-thirds of the book, amid protestations that we shouldn’t, oh no, not until we’re married. Pirates and villains kidnapped the unlucky girl through novel after novel, and she was never quite sure why the heroine struggled so to escape. Even without a heart of gold, they had given the heroine the gift of freedom. Our heroine could not bring herself to struggle on dates, but received no such reward.

There once was a girl who read about science, who fell passionately in love with the sweep of stars where they lashed the night sky. Late at night, she sat at the darkened window and watched the sky dance slowly toward dawn, dreaming awake of dancing with them, of seeing their titanic blaze hanging in the emptiness and defying it. Explosions, very large, millions of years long—she yearned for them as she had the dinosaurs a few years earlier. Regret stabbed her beneath the breast and she put them both down, credulity overtaxed. Fantasy at last.

There once was a girl who jammed both fingers in her ears, shutting out the world, and dreamed of a crack in reality that she could run through, of her beloved heroes calling her name just off the edge of reality and close as a whisper, in a space where she might be special, might be something more than the cutting edge of words where they ricocheted around her.

There once was a girl who wrote stories, who wrote herself into worlds and lives, fueled by sweet and bitter longing for the brittle clarity of a plot: one heroine, one villain, one struggle, one happy ending. The neatness of it appealed to her more the older she grew, the reliable way good triumphed and evil earned its own reward. The characters still spoke in her ears when she agonized over decisions, their arch masks shallow, but no less the voice of justice for it. She wrote them and she wrote them. She would have given nearly anything to pull them out of the pages.

There once was girl whose relationship with characters was her shield against the world, their strength making light of her merely mortal struggles. She set them ahead of her, like beacons on which to match her small agonies, on which to dash away her daily fears. They were her compass, notwithstanding the difficulty of matching an epic battle between light and darkness against a bully without self-conscious laughter. But she did, and they did, and she stood up, forewarned that it would cost her.

There once was a girl who visited the library like a friend, diving the pages that taught her something of good and evil. She was grateful for their good company.

There once was a girl. Oh yes. There once was a girl.


End file.
